Cook County prosecutors have rewritten their contract with the company that sends crime victims legally required alerts about jail releases, explicitly barring it from handing personal data about people held in the Cook County Jail to federal law-enforcement agencies or to third-party databases that could feed immigration enforcement. The Cook County State's Attorney's Office said the revised contract with Appriss Inc. is already in effect, making the county one of the first jurisdictions in the country to close the vendor route in writing.
Source: Cook County State's Attorney's Office
Under the new terms, Appriss must not disclose any personal data to federal law-enforcement officials or to third-party databases that may be used to support immigration enforcement, and it must take steps to prevent any company it contracts with from being able to access or purchase personal information about individuals held in the Cook County Jail, the State's Attorney's Office said. The change targets the indirect route — data moving from a county vendor to a commercial database, and from that database to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — rather than any direct county-to-ICE handover.
Appriss may not share Cook County Jail personal data with federal law enforcement, with ICE, or with third-party databases — including databases such as LexisNexis Risk Solutions that may themselves sell information to federal agencies — and it must stop its own contractors from accessing or buying that data.
How the data used to travel
Appriss runs the victim-notification work: Illinois law requires that crime victims be told when an accused or convicted person is released from custody, transferred or has a court date change, and the county's jail custody data flows to the vendor so those alerts can be sent. The concern, documented since at least 2022, was what happened next. Appriss's other customers include ICE itself and LexisNexis Risk Solutions, and a contract clause allowed jail data to be shared onward with other companies. LexisNexis, in turn, sells law-enforcement access to its databases under a contract with ICE worth up to $22.1 million, and records obtained by Just Futures Law showed ICE's Chicago field office ran more than 13,000 LexisNexis searches between March and September 2021 alone, the Chicago Patriot reported, citing earlier Chicago Sun-Times reporting from June.
Source: Chicago Patriot
The State's Attorney's Office has been tightening the contract in stages. In October 2025, under State's Attorney Eileen O'Neill Burke, the office updated the contract to prohibit any data sharing with ICE. In August this year it required Appriss to turn off the data feed supplying information to third parties. The latest revision adds the remaining layer: a ban on sharing with databases that may themselves sell private information to federal agencies.
Why courthouses are the backdrop
The office said the changes come as ICE continues to target courthouses. Over the past year, its release said, ICE agents have repeatedly been spotted at Cook County courthouses — including the Domestic Violence Courthouse, the Leighton Criminal Courthouse and the Markham Courthouse — have made arrests on courthouse property and, in other instances, appear to have waited for individuals to leave court proceedings before taking them into custody. Tensions have risen as agents continued operations around courthouses despite an earlier restriction on arrests without warrants signed by Chief Judge Timothy Evans, and Governor JB Pritzker has previously signed legislation adding protections for immigrants near courthouses, hospitals, universities and daycare centres.
Source: First Balkan Media
"Everyone participating in the justice system – regardless of immigration status – should be able to trust that their personal information will be protected," State's Attorney Eileen Burke said in the office's statement. "We will continue to stand up for our immigrant communities and try to reduce the harm that's been caused by ICE's reckless actions. When victims, witnesses, and defendants are afraid to come to court, it undermines our ability to seek justice and keep our communities safe."
A coalition that campaigned on the issue — Mijente, Organized Communities Against Deportations, the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights and Just Futures Law — called the change a hard-won victory, saying companies hired to serve local communities should not be allowed to profit by selling residents' information to ICE. Cook County Commissioner Alma Anaya said that after years of advocacy, the dangerous language that allowed the sharing of personal information will finally be removed from the Appriss contract, and she called on other county agencies to close similar loopholes.
The gap that remains: the statewide contract
Cook County's contract covers Cook County only. The statewide victim-notification system is a separate contract signed by Attorney General Kwame Raoul in May 2021, worth about $6.07 million and running through June 2028. WBEZ reported last week that the state contract contains a data-sharing clause of its own; as of November 2024, 88 county jails, 96 court systems and 31 state corrections facilities participated in the system, and the Attorney General's office told WBEZ it is committed to protecting residents' information. Separately, the Cook County Board approved a procurement ordinance unanimously in October that bars county contractors from disclosing residents' personal information to immigration agents without a criminal warrant or judicial order, or passing it to data brokers; it takes effect about 60 days after adoption.
For Cook County's large immigrant communities — including the Punjabi and South Asian families spread across Chicago and its suburbs — the practical change is narrow but real: a booking into the county jail should no longer generate a data trail that a federal agency can buy its way into. The measure does not amount to a complete ban on federal immigration enforcement in Cook County, and ICE can still operate in the county; what has closed is one documented way its officers could learn who was in the jail, and when they were getting out.
What happens next is enforcement of the paper: the revised Appriss terms are effective now, the county board's wider contractor ordinance follows in about 60 days, and attention now shifts to whether the Attorney General's statewide contract is rewritten on the same lines before it runs to June 2028. The State's Attorney's Office said it will also keep certifying U-visa applications for crime victims, facilitating virtual meetings to reduce ICE encounters at courthouses, and upholding Illinois' TRUST Act, which prohibits cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.